Recently, there is increased demand for streaming video image data in a real-time manner via various communication means such as the Internet. Particularly recently, in digital broadcasting and Internet television, it has become common to perform real-time data distribution by transport streaming specified by MPEG2, which is a technology of compressing and multiplexing video images and audio (see patent document 1).
When the transport stream specified by MPEG2 is received and the video images and audio are reproduced, multiple TS (Transport Stream) packets including information necessary to start reproducing are received, and then the video images and audio are reproduced with the use of information included in the TS packets.
Patent document 1: Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2008-245061
However, when video images and audio are reproduced by the above technology, it takes a certain amount of time until all of the TS packets including information needed to start reproduction are received. Therefore, a time lag occurs from the start of data reception until the start of data reproduction.